The 1-Page Marketing Plan

Transcript

Jeff Bullas

00:01:58 - 00:02:46

Hi everyone and welcome to the Jeff Bullas show. Today I have with me. Allan Dib. Now, I met Allan a few years ago at a live conference which are very rare these days in North Sydney and I got to hear Allan sharing his story about how he made money out of his book and book is “The One Page Marketing Plan”. So success was found by Allan. Allan is a serial entrepreneur, rebellious marketer, technology expert. He has also started growing successfully, exited multiple businesses and various industries. One of his previous businesses was the hyper-competitive telecommunications industry, where he faced heated competition for multibillion-dollar, multinational competitors. In four years, Allan grew this business from a startup to being named by Business Review Weekly as one of Australia's fastest growing companies, earning a spot on the coveted BRW Fast 100 list.

Welcome to the show, Allan, it's great to have you here.

Allan Dib

00:02:47 - 00:02:51

Hey Jeff, it's a pleasure to be on.

Jeff Bullas

00:02:52 - 00:04:11

So Allan, I initially saw you, I met you at a workshop which was held in Sydney and I was impressed by the story you shared of how you actually had launched a successfully booked, “The One Page Marketing Plan”, and had proceeded to generate really great cash flow and out of that and I was impressed by that. But success wise is sort of like, I suppose, a natural outgrowth with multiple revenue streams including coaching and so on from there. That's how I met Allan and that's how I met you and that was really, I was impressed. And so that's why I wanted to get you on the show and hear more about it.

So let's go back to, I'm always intrigued by people's stories, in other words, what inspired them? I do love the term accidental entrepreneur, it seems to happen quite regularly. I don't know whether you are or not, but what I'd like to know is where did the idea come from to write “The One Page Marketing Plan” and then how that evolves. So where did the idea come from? Was an aha moment, a drink at a pub with friends, was it a dream in the middle of the night? Was that, you know, a quiet walk on the beach and you got struck by a bolt of lightning? Tell us how it happened.

Allan Dib

00:04:11 - 00:05:30

I wish it was something as exciting as any of those things that you've mentioned, Jeff, but it was a lot less exciting. Look, I was working as a marketing consultant for and a lot of my clients, I wanted to do a marketing plan because hey, it's a good idea if we're gonna do some marketing that we’re planning out and so I've got a lot of pushback, I got a lot of resistance, like too hard, too difficult, don't know where to start, need to hire a consultant, all of that sort of thing. And so I created a framework where someone could easily create a one page marketing plan on a single page where literally in a single page. So it's not difficult. Anyone can follow that framework, anyone can do it. And it was incredibly successful for my clients and even outside of my clients, people started sharing that framework and I thought there's something to this. And so I wanted it to get it to a much wider audience. And so that was one of the reasons I wrote the book to get it out to a much wider audience, to share that framework with a lot of people. And I think today over a million businesses around the world have used that framework to put together a marketing plan, to put together a plan for growing their business and getting clear around what they need to do with their marketing.

Jeff Bullas

00:05:31 - 00:05:49

So it sounds to me and correct me if I'm wrong, sounds like that you met resistance and from that and saw a problem that needed to be solved to overcome that resistance and get people to write a marketing plan.

Allan Dib

00:05:49 - 00:05:50

Exactly.

Jeff Bullas

00:05:51 - 00:06:42

So, and we, as many of us know, is that distilling complexity into something simple as a one page marketing plan sounds easy, but the challenge is distilling that complexity into simplicity and coming up with a coherent, I suppose, strategy or document or template that helps people do it. So what was the writing of the book like? The process. Tell us a little bit about that because I think a lot of people would like to know how to write a successful book and obviously you have, if you've sold a million copies. Allan, that's incredibly impressive. So maybe we can have a quick chat about what's involved in being a successful author and writing the book. So how did you start the book writing?

Allan Dib

00:06:42 - 00:10:07

So the way the book started was I had written a series of blog posts over the years on just on my website, you know, and for SEO purposes and for traffic and you know, they were actually worked quite well at the time was a lot easier than it is now. Now it's become much more technical, much more competitive in all of that. But anyway, that aside I had written I think probably about 100 articles, which is not that much when it comes to, so now people turn out thousands and thousands of articles and basically I took some of my best performing blog articles and I used them as seeds for my book. So I took and I looked at what some of the most high performing articles were. So they were around direct response marketing, what is marketing, what is a brand, all the basic stuff that a business owner would want to know when they were thinking about marketing. And so some I basically took my best performing articles, literally posted the copied and pasted them into a Google Doc. And obviously I had an outline for the book and the outline for the book was very, very simple because “The One Page Marketing Plan” framework is nine boxes. So now I had nine chapters for the book and then I also put in an introduction and a conclusion. And then I started using the blog posts as seed material. So I would say that the blog posts altogether probably made up maybe, in aggregate, maybe 50% of the book. And then I filled in the rest over a period of about 30, 40 days. I wrote like a madman, I spent about 30, 40 days writing, 16 hour days writing, editing, putting that together. And then I got the version of one of the books out there, which was really bad, had lots of grammatical mistakes, had typesetting areas, had all sorts of stuff, but I just had to get something out there, otherwise I would have procrastinated on it for another two years.

So, so really, if I was to give you a summary, it's come up with the framework. So what's the thing that you're going to be famous for? In my case, it's “The One Page Marketing Plan”. For Michael Gerber, it's the E-Myth. For Gino Wickman, it’s Traction. So start with the framework. What's the big idea, what's the framework then put together an outline, the outline of the book is going to, what are the chapter's going to be? And then really, I mean there's no substitute for this, but write a good book, right. A lot of people are like, yes, you can get someone to buy a book for the first time or whatever, if it's clickbait or if it's whatever, you use some kind of some special marketing technique or whatever, but you're never going to sell half a million or a million copies or whatever if you've written a crappy book. So it's gotta be, it's gotta be good material, right. It's gonna be something that people share, that people buy in paperback format and they say, hey, I want to listen to it by the audiobook and hey, I want to send my friend a copy and so they buy another copy for their friends and so on and so forth. So that's how you sell half a million or a million million books by writing a good book and you know, I wish I had a shortcut to that, but that's just what it is.

Jeff Bullas

00:10:08 - 00:10:32

So yeah, number one, so thanks for sharing that framework for writing a book and correct, great content adds value to people and businesses. So, but the devil's in the detail in terms of marketing. Okay, so tell us a bit about, I suppose, the successful pillars if you like, for marketing your book, how did you go about marketing your book and getting it out there?

Allan Dib

00:10:33 - 00:14:34

Yeah. So we did a few things. So we started doing what we call finding cousin books meaning books that had a similar message or a complimentary message that had a similar audience. So for us it was some of the ones that I've just mentioned. So like Gino Wickman’s Traction, Mike Michalowicz’s Profit First, Michael Gerber’s E-Myth. So they all have a similar audience, that small business owner, someone who's looking to kind of expand their business, maybe one day, exit their business, all of those sorts of things. And I understood this person very, very well because that was me, you know, several years earlier. So if you don't understand the person that you're writing for then you definitely need to do some research and kind of get in their shoes. In my case, that was easy, that was me, you know, 10 years earlier, I have no idea what to do with marketing. I was a dead broke IT geek, struggling to get clients in the door. So I very much understood the pain points in the journey that my audience had. And so we started to recognize some of these other books which were called cousin books and cousin authors. And then I had my team basically reach out to anyone who had reviewed one of those books in the past, as someone who had reviewed maybe Gino Wickman’s Traction or whatever. Either on their YouTube channel or in their blog or whatever. We said, hey we've got a new book on marketing, had a similar audience as you know, Michael Gerber's E-Myth or whatever, would you mind if we sent you a free copy and in exchange we just love it if you did us a review. And so that was one of the, one of the tactics that we used where we found people who had written reviews of similar or not, maybe not similar, but what we called cousin books and cousin authors and we asked them to write reviews. I also did, what a lot of authors do is we created a process around getting on as a guest on podcasts. Now more than ever we kind of get those requests inbound, but certainly at the time nobody had any idea who I was or whatever. So we had to have an outreach process where we reached after certain podcasts again, gave them a bit of a summary about what, what the value was and why they would want to interview me and we used that to get on podcasts. We also use paid advertising where we would target other, again cousin books, cousin authors. So on, with Amazon, you can run ads and you can say, look, anyone who pulls up Michael Michalowicz’s Profit First or whatever, show them our ad. And so we did that as well. We've done all sorts of things. We've run free, get the book free, just pay shipping kind of offers. So we did a whole host of things. And to be honest, the specific tactics are not that important. What was important was the mindset behind them. And here's what I mean, I see so many times an author will spend years writing and researching a book then they focus all their efforts on launch week and that's it. They fizzle out. So you spend five years creating this product, this framework and then you spend maybe a month promoting it and then you move on to the next book and or the next project or whatever. And I think that's such an incredible waste. And so for me it was long-term thinking. And now, literally, now we spend much more time and much more effort promoting the book and advertising and all of that sort of stuff than we ever did in launch week. And that was, I think five years ago since the book first came out. So I would advise people to have a long-term view of, if you're looking to write a book and really view it as an asset. It's not something that's kind of like, hey, launch week and then we move on to the next next thing, which is what I see many authors do.

Jeff Bullas

00:14:34 - 00:14:42

Yeah. So what you described to me is essentially is playing the long game with a persistent process?

Allan Dib

00:14:43 - 00:14:45

Totally. Exactly.

Jeff Bullas

00:14:45 - 00:15:03

And I think as business owners, many of us especially get excited by the big idea. We expect one or two tactics is going to deliver success and we realized that it doesn't, and many people give up because the reality is we're playing a long term game.

Allan Dib

00:15:04 - 00:15:05

Jeff Bullas

00:15:05 - 00:15:43

So, that's the reality and I think that typically most entrepreneurs don't fall in love with the process of their big idea, either they actually fall in love with the idea of what they're doing, but they actually don't double down on process and systems. And what you've described to me is a very long term game where you actually had a whole range of tactics and you said the tactics, it’s sells maybe weren't important. But the fact that I played a long, persistent game of marketing relentlessly. That's what it sounds like to me, is that correct?

Allan Dib

00:15:43 - 00:17:44

That's correct. The other thing I really want to emphasize is assets and I talked to my coaching clients, we talk a lot about building marketing assets. So here's the thing, like people in financial services, they understand this really well, like if I own a house, I can rent that out for rental income if I own stocks, I get dividend income. And so that's because I own an asset and I derive income from that asset and the exact same thing is true of marketing. If you have a marketing asset, you can drive new leads, new prospects, new clients from that. Now in the absence of having a marketing asset, multiple marketing assets, you're going to have to replace that with time effort pushing cold calling, all of those sorts of things. I'll give you an example in our business, if I had to wake up every morning and do 20 cold calls, I would hate my life, right. That's not what I want to be doing. Instead I get to open my email inbox and I say, hey, we sold a whole bunch of courses overnight, hey somebody's joined my certification program, someone's interested in coaching or whatever. So we get a lot of leads inbound. Why not? Because we're anything super special or anything crazy or some crazy marketing technique? No, because we have assets that are working for us. So the book, for example, people read the book, they send some portion of them, join one of our programs, are asked to join one of our programs. And so that generates a lot of lead flow. So if you don't have assets in your business, you're going to have to replace that with time, money, effort, advertising, all of those sorts of things which are difficult and expensive and getting more difficult and getting more expensive. So one of the things I really encourage all of my clients to do is to build marketing assets in their business very, very powerful concepts. So income comes from assets and that absolutely applies to marketing the same way.

Jeff Bullas

00:17:45 - 00:18:00

In terms of assets. You've mentioned some of them, what's maybe some of the top three you think that are really important and absolutely core to that, that every entrepreneur should be creating what some two or three or four core assets?

Allan Dib

00:18:00 - 00:21:17

They will differ from business to business or industry to industry. But here's a few that I really like. So if you're in the B2B space, I think creating an industry based report. So where you're, you're commenting on the state of the industry. So I'll give you an example, there's a company called Alchemy and not many people outside of tech really know them. But inside of tech, they're a big company, they're the distribution network behind like iTunes, Microsoft, all of those, like anytime you download a large file, you're probably using their services in the background now. Like I said, very few people outside of tech know them, but they're well known in the tech industry and they come out with a quarterly report every, every quarter talking about the state of the internet. So what's happening on the internet with broadband speeds? What are the cybersecurity threats? All of those sorts of things. And they get a lot of press, a lot of coverage because of that. Like if you've ever read one of those articles where it says, hey careers internet is 10 times better than Australia or faster or whatever. That's based on the research from Alchemy's state of the internet report. And I think that's a really powerful thing to get famous for is a quarterly state of whatever it could be paid, the state of real estate in whatever your area is or the state of whatever medical practices or whatever you specialize in. So that's great in a B2B. So that's a powerful asset you can have in a B2B context, another really good asset I think that you can build is something data related where you're releasing data on a regular basis or maybe even commenting on data.

So for example, I was looking for a real estate agent to sell my property. One of the first things I want to know is, well, what's my, what's my house worth now? Of course I can invite some real estate agents to do an appraisal, but that's a higher level of commitment. Wouldn't it be cool if I could download a report maybe released monthly by the local real estate agent that would give me data about how sale prices in my street and my area and around there. So that's another example of an asset. There's another example where I, that's maybe a, how to guide. So for example, there's a software company that does help desk software. And so someone who's interested in help desk software is probably interested in better customer service. So they've written a report on how to deliver a better customer experience online, right. So somebody downloading that report would be a high probability prospects for help desk software, right. So if I want a better customer experience online, I probably need some help desk. It's software or some tools to do that. So depending on what business you're in, there are different types of marketing assets that you can and should build. And the other thing I would say is think about modality. So are you really good on camera, meaning, hey, you can create video assets or you're good at talking, which in which case, hey podcast could be a really good asset or are you good at writing, in which case do a book or do a report? So what modality do you prefer to do long term and what modality are you really good at? So that's another factor that I would consider.

Jeff Bullas

00:21:18 - 00:21:32

Yeah, I love the modality aspect, that's really, it's really cool. It's like if you're a good writer, well,l write an e-book and you might be good across a range of modalities, but you usually find a sweet spot, don't you?

Allan Dib

00:21:33 - 00:21:58

Totally, totally, totally and you know, start with the one that you're strongest in. So for example, for me, writing is my strong suit, you know, I don't think I'm super great on video or audio, but I still do it. But because I'm expanding my sphere and I know some of my audience prefers to listen and some of my audience prefers to watch, but my strength would be in writing. And so that's kind of my native modality, but I'm expanding my sphere as I go.

Jeff Bullas

00:21:59 - 00:22:12

Yeah, so one of the modalities that sort of emerged in the last little while, especially with some of the newer platforms, such as TikTok is short video. So where do you see short video in the marketing toolbox today?

Allan Dib

00:22:13 - 00:23:30

I think it's super powerful. So I see TikTok as a discovery platform. So whereas people compare it to Instagram, but I think Instagram is more for the nurturing phase. Usually people following you on Instagram, they're not discovering you there, they usually already know you and they're just following you because they like you or like your stuff or whatever. Whereas I think TikTok is probably in the next 12 months I think, and maybe that window will close after that is a great discovery platform because you're constantly, they're constantly showing you stuff that they think will be relevant to you, but that you don't necessarily follow. In fact the following component on TikTok feels very secondary to the actual, the discovery and the algorithm throwing up stuff that you think it will like, and I've got to say, I mean, I've found it very addictive. So I mean going back to Instagram after Tiktok, Instagram feels boring, like there's nothing going on, like, whereas Tik Tok is constant, that dopamine and new videos, new things get going on. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've been sitting there and hours passed and I'm like, what the heck am I doing? But really, I think they've really cracked the addiction algorithm.

Jeff Bullas

00:23:31 - 00:24:09

How we found like the biggest challenge we had with social media has been that it's moved very much since 2013, 2014 from organic, which was one of the things I loved about it is that you could build and earn an audience. And as Facebook went to a public company, it had to make money. So of course it started to really double down on becoming pay to play. I think some of the things that I would be interested in your thoughts to is how do you see TikTok, for example, isn't as at the moment much more organic. Do you think that is true?

Allan Dib

00:24:09 - 00:25:26

I do. I do. I think that is true. And I think like I said, I think there's a window of maybe 12-18 months where people can get big on TikTok, but it's still relatively new for a lot of people and a lot of brands are not yet on it. So, I think there's a big opportunity there and I'm, I'm experimenting and hacking with it at the moment as well. So, I think there is a big opportunity there. I think it's a new type of platform as well. I think that that's just so much more addictive than anything I've seen before. So I think that there is that opportunity and I think the other thing is I like that, it's not as highly produced, like Instagram feels like this perfect kind of filtered world where everyone looks amazing and everyone looks like they're having an amazing time and everyone's better looking richer and happier than you are on Instagram, right. Whereas TikTok feels more real, like, you know, people who have shot a quick video or response to a video or whatever, it doesn't feel as highly produced yet. I mean that may change, but at the moment that's how it feels.

Jeff Bullas

00:25:26 - 00:26:00

Yeah, yeah, because that's one of the challenge of social media is that and there's a phrase that I heard a while back from a friend of mine and she said that and she got it from somewhere else, but it was basically on social media, we judge our insides by the outside of others. And that means that you look at all these looks like very successful people on Instagram or on social media and going my life is so boring, I'm not successful. I don't have that many followers and I think it can be quite depressing, frankly.

Allan Dib

00:26:01 - 00:27:12

Well, yeah, and of course we know it's, it's all people just show their best, people generally don't show their worst and the other thing I came across a good one the other day that said you can judge a social media platform by who the royalty on that platform is meaning like who's revered on that platform. So for example, for Twitter it's kind of like academia, intellectuals, crypto bros, that sort of thing. They're kind of the royalty of Twitter. The royalty on Instagram is kind of like the influence of the Kardashians, the people who are showing how wonderful their life is and the mommy yoga fit influencers and all of that sort of stuff. On LinkedIn, it's kind of like the humble brags, right. You know, I'm so honored to say I've just gotten promotion or whatever, that sort of thing. So it's kind of like people in suits, they're the royalty of that platform and so you can, you can tell the platform by who's kind of revered as the royalty on those platforms are always an interesting way of looking at it.

Jeff Bullas

00:27:12 - 00:27:53

That is very interesting. It sort of identifies which people and Twitter for example, is also about journalists and also about celebrities and politicians. It's giving a voice to the powerful in a sense and I'm going to be very curious to see what if he's successful, Elon musk, buying Twitter and making it private, what that is going to look like but I'd certainly Twitter for me showed incredible promise for about four or five years but it's certainly platitude and I think it's never really realized its potential.

Allan Dib

00:27:54 - 00:28:17

Well they, yeah, they really stagnated for a long time and I think it'll be interesting to see what Elon does with it. I'm, you know, I'm excited about free speech and him really buying that platform because of that. I think blocking people based on their opinions or whatever, I don't agree with that.

Jeff Bullas

00:28:18 - 00:29:10

Yeah, now it's going to be fascinating. So I think watch this space on Twitter or about, we're about to discover, Twitter was my go to platform starting off. And so for me, it was really, and it was when it was very organic. So it certainly has a platitude and I think stagnated. And I think part of the challenge was that Jack Dorsey, who runs and owns Square, was a one day a week CEO. And I don't think that's very good in terms of getting stuff done. So yeah. So when did you realize that you actually had a serious revenue from the book and then decided to double down on the next evolution of the business? Did you sort of said, I'm going to stop doing marketing consulting of what happened next?

Allan Dib

00:29:10 - 00:32:13

No, we do more marketing consulting than ever. And the book is a nice revenue stream, but it's not the vast majority of our business. Most of our revenue comes from consulting, from coaching, from our certification program and from our membership. So the book is a great front end and you know, it's amazing to see, you know, someone can buy the book on the $2.99 on Kindle or for one credit on Audible, it's a very popular audiobook. That's one of the formats that it really does very well on. And so someone can go from spending a couple of dollars on either the audio book or the Kindle version of the paperback version and then they can spend tens of thousands of dollars as a client either in consulting or one of our other other programs. And so the revenue from the book is nice, but it's not going to build a massive business, even though a highly successful book like mine, I mean it does pretty well, but I don't think it's enough to build a business on its own. So we see it very much as a front end for some of the other programs that we've got and it's not just about selling people more stuff, it's about, you know, there's only so much you can take from a book and kind of implement, people do need a helping hand with practical implementation because you know, you can read something and you can intellectually know it. But there's a big gap between intellectually knowing something and actually practically implemented. I learned that the hard way over the weekend, I was watching a TikTok and you know, I've been on a health journey over the last couple of years and I've lost a lot of weight muscle, all of that. But anyway, long story short, I was on TikTok and the guys is showing, hey, I'll show you how to do a low calorie, high protein omelet. Just get the egg whites, chuck them in the pan, chop up some tomato, put some chili powder on whatever. And I'm like, I could do that and I can tell you the mess I made of that, it was an absolute disaster, has spent an hour cleaning up afterwards. The omelet was okay by the way. But that really highlighted to me the difference between intellectually knowing something and practically knowing right. So, so intellectually, I knew, oh cool, you're throwing some egg whites, chop up some tomato, flip it, whatever. But practically doing it was a very different story. And that's really the transformation. I see a lot of our clients making as well. So you may intellectually know that hey, I need a lead magnet or I need to an email sequence or I need a marketing asset and that's going to generate lead flow. But practically implementing it, that takes some practice that takes some guidance. It takes someone to, to really help you through that process and so that's a lot of what we do is really help people take people who are business owners from point A to point B and really help them with clarifying their marketing, getting their marketing assets built and getting all of those things done that they know that they should be doing.

Jeff Bullas

00:32:14 - 00:33:00

Yeah. I love the fact that you really use the book as almost a DIY project in other words do it yourself. And then some people are happy to do that. In fact they will dive in, they'll learn themselves, then you've got the other ones that you just mentioned, they want their hand held, they want to be taken on the journey, they need someone by their side. And I think that's really important is that offering something that allows them to do that as a almost a low cost entry point where you build that credibility and trust and then the other one is holding their hand and taking them on the journey with you, such as coaching and training. So you now provide coaching and training, don't you? So tell us a little bit about that.

Allan Dib

00:33:01 - 00:35:18

Yeah, so we've got a one-on-one coaching program which has been extremely, extremely popular. We work with business owners and marketing assistance in the business. If the business owner doesn't have a marketing assistance to help them deploy marketing campaigns and things like that will either help them hire that person or we'll train up someone in their business to do that. Because at the end of the, most business owners are not the right person to run the marketing component because like most business owners, I include myself in this, we get bored really easily. We'll do it once, twice, three times and move on. And so really how you win the game of marketing is through consistency by doing the daily, weekly, monthly stuff consistently and most business owners are the wrong people, first of all, personality wise, secondly, time and resource wise, you know, they're busy, they're putting out fires all day dealing with suppliers, employees, all of that sort of thing. And marketing just gets pushed down and down and down on their list. So you need that person in the business who kind of wakes up and thinks about marketing. So that's our one-on-one coaching and consulting program. Then we've got a group program. So where there's a, there's a weekly group call, people can get on talk to a coach to ask questions, all of those sorts of things and there's, we've got a big back catalog of training that we, you can access through the group program and then we have a monthly training that we do with that.

We've also got the course, which is basically the book on steroids. So it's a lot, a lot of the concepts of the book, but hey, how do I implement them in my business? So it's a self paced, do it yourself course. And then finally we've got a certification program and certification program is all about people who want to run a coaching or consulting practice and so we've taken all the best practices that we've learned over the last five years in running a seven figure coaching and consulting practice basically and over a 12 week bootcamp, we show you, you know how to get new clients, how to manage the clients, how to implement the one page marketing plan framework, all of those sorts of things. So basically you walk away with a really good framework on how to run a six or seven figure coaching and consulting.

Jeff Bullas

00:35:19 - 00:35:42

That's great. So, what's, okay just to wrap it up here, Allan, what are some of the biggest learnings you've had as an entrepreneur over the last decade or so? What's two or three tips you'd like to share with people that are either about to start a business or want to grow our business and the challenge as an entrepreneur, the top two or 3 tips you'd like to share with us.

Allan Dib

00:35:43 - 00:37:21

The first thing that I'll say is, yeah, the best product or the best service doesn't always win in the marketplace. Unfortunately, you know, it would be so awesome if life was a meritocracy, but it's, it's really not, you know, I had a good quote the other day and it's so true. You don't get what you deserve, You get what you negotiate. And so from a business perspective, a lot of people feel like, hey, if I've got the best product or the best service in my industry, I'm going to naturally rise to the top and that's not true. What we find is that the best marketer wins every time. You know, I wish that the most deserving people in our society got paid the most, but it's not the case. You know, I wish firefighters and nurses got paid the most, but they don't because that's just the way it is. And so okay if you've got a good product or a good service, you need good marketing or it's going to fail, build it and they will come. It’s a great movie plot. It's not a good business strategy. So, as I see that mistake made a lot and I certainly made that mistake in the early days as well. You know, I thought, hey, we've got a great IT service here, our current customers like us a lot and I thought, you know, the customers would just flood in and of course they didn't. So you need to become a really good marketer. So that's one of the top things that I would really, I urge people to do is become a good market because no one knows how good your product or service is before they buy, they only know how good your marketing is.

Jeff Bullas

00:37:22 - 00:38:14

I think that's a great suggestion. I think the other thing I loved you've shared over a chat here is that you've got to play the long game of marketing to create a library of assets that you can keep reeling out all the time and persist. And I think that is, you know, the great, great insights and people forget that marketing is not just a sexy video or it's basically a technical process and if you've got enough good tactical processes, then the marketing will be this rich, deep, asset driven approach, which a lot of people just don't even think about it. I just love your context and on that, it was really, really good.

Allan Dib

00:38:14 - 00:38:16

It's a process, not an event.

Jeff Bullas

00:38:17 - 00:38:28

Exactly, and I think that's a great way to finish a chat. It's a process, not an event. Guys, remember that. Thank you, Allan for sharing your wisdom. It's been absolutely fabulous. Thank you.

Allan Dib

00:38:28 - 00:38:29

My pleasure.